The Modern Independent

Texas's Low-Wall of Separation: Thomas Aquinas for President?

On Friday, the Texas Board of Education approved sweeping changes to the state's social studies curriculum. These reforms will put a markedly conservative stamp on history and economic textbooks for years to come, and it will have wide-reaching consequences for the national textbook market because Texas is the second largest purchaser of high school textbooks. According to the New York Times, the changes were made on the 10 to 5 party-in vote and they are intended to stress "the superiority of American capitalism, question the Founding Fathers' commitment to a purely secular government and present Republican political philosophies in a more positive light."

The new Texas social studies standards mark only the most recent chapter in the culture wars, which have until recently remained dormant for the last couple of years. Some of the changes made are not that objectionable, at least not for me. For example, one change includes the addition of Milton Friedman and Fredrick von Hayek, whose work have had an enormous impact on the direction of economic theory and helped justify the massive efforts to deregulate the economy the last 30 years, to the usual list of economists studied, which already includes Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. Another relatively benign change, is new emphasis on the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, which again is something that cannot be ignored especially because of its indelible impact on the modern state. Even the inclusion of the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers during the civil rights movement is intellectually defensible so long as the Panther's relative influence within the largely non-violent movement is kept in proper perspective.